Tavern on the Meta

@Moshe, cull, cull, cull :)

@Moshe, actually, I seem to recall there is some kind of auto-cull, can't remember where I read that though - it's mega-tolerant though, something like a year later with no repeat visits.

cull?

No there are some year old 1 rep zombies there. Even one with a profile pic and URL.

Stack Overflow Blog: When Is An Account “Abandoned”?

7:16 AM

Culling

Culling is the process of removing animals from a group based on specific criteria. This is done in order to either reinforce certain desirable characteristics or to remove certain undesirable characteristics from the group. For livestock and wildlife, the process of culling usually implies the killing of animals with undesirable characteristics. Origin of the term The word comes from the Latin colligere, which means collect. The term can be applied broadly to mean sorting a collection into two groups: one that will be kept and one that will be rejected. The cull is the set of items rejec...

Marc Gravell

Posted by Jeff Atwood on February 15th, 2009

Let’s talk about deletion.

Not question deletion, which works this way, for the record. The deletion I want to talk about today is account deletion.

Stack Overflow is a bit unusual in that our accounts are ultra lightweight. We don’t require registration; we allow essentially anonymous posting. We were inspired by Wikipedia in this regard. We wanted to reduce the friction of asking and answering to little more than entering an anonymous comment on a blog. For example, we often don’t even have an email address for our users. And we’re fine with that. I can’t think of very many sites with as loose a definition of account as Stack Overflow. …

I honestly haven't looked to see if that is still active

@MarcGravell, thanks, I couldn't remember whether I'd read it on the blog or on meta. Whatever, the long tail is still very long :)

Q: Remind new users to choose some answers?

And what about my other point, in the question?

0

I've seen some new users lately with very low rep that are asking away and not selecting answers. This hurts them and others. It hurts them because they don't gain the rep of having selected an answer, and it hurts others because they don't award rep where it is deserved. Also, it clutters SE wi...

discussion feature-request accept-rate

looks like it's not true though:

user186592

1

@Moshe, I'd say rather than fiddling with the appearance of the tick, maybe there could be a callout when you vote up an answer on your first question -> "If this is the answer, you can mark it as such by clicking here"

The subsequently maybe nags on the Ask a question page: "People aren't going to be motivated to answer your questions if you never mark answers"

@Benjol - that is another approach that can work.

Remember, this is only until users are more experienced/balanced.

7:22 AM

Having said that, I wouldn't push too hard, because otherwise you have people accepting answers "randomly" just to fiddle their stats

right.

Again, just for the first X questions and only if you have less than Y accept rate between 5 and X questions. (Under about 5 a single question makes too much of an impact on the accept rate.)

updating my answer to reflect this discussion

@MarcGravell, re your comment, see mine ;)

Does anyone really understand how the system determines who gets the taxonomist badge? Does it keep track of the actual creator, or is it some other algorithm?

7:52 AM

@LanceRoberts, Not me, in any case :)

Hmmm... they pushed out their implementation of the new homepage algo already, hmmm?

Not bad, these questions do look pretty interesting to me

Q: Help us choose a sort order for the Stack Overflow homepage

Seen this?

11

A overwhelming amount of feedback for Help us redesign the Stack Overflow homepage was: "Keep the way the front page looks, just tweak the question order" Interesting algorithms were suggested by Kip and radp, but there was no real playground to experiment. Enter Home Page MiniCollider™ Questi...

discussion stackoverflow homepage

@Benjol Yeah, but I didn't know they'll be pushing it out this quickly. That question was like, what, 4 days ago?

2

2 actually. Didn't expect them to move this quickly on a site that has such large amount off traffic

8:03 AM

Getting more question answered more quickly is top priority :)

@YiJiang, do you get the empty notification if you try the /update command?

It tells me that there's an error even though I've managed to update

@YiJiang, yeah, but the exception has no message - makes debugging a bit difficult. I'm considering just wrapping the update code in a try with empty catch. Which is pretty much the equivalent of VBs 'On error resume next'. Not pretty...

@Benjol Lemme see the code?

    validateArgs(0);
    try {
        window.location = "http://github.com/rchern/StackExchangeScripts/raw/master/SEChatModifications.user.js";
    } catch(e) { } //do nothing, swallow 'Unknown exception 0x805e000a'
   return CommandState.SucceededDoClear;

oops

Okay, two Google hits suggests a problem with Adblock Plus

I'm going to say that swallowing it would be the best solution here

Maybe drop in a if(console) console.log(e), but it's pretty unlikely that a call to window.location would generate any errors anyway

8:19 AM

@YiJiang I don't have adblock, but if you're ok with swallowing it, so am I, we'll be two on the wheel of blame :)

Help, I did a git merge upstream, but my origin/master is pointing at my last commit, not rchern's merge :(

@YiJiang, pull request posted :)

Q: BTBNT supply Louis Vuitton Genuine Leather Handbags On Sale 95771 Green

8:41 AM

SPAM, please flag it.

0

Louis Vuitton Genuine Leather Handbags On Sale 95771 Green Louis Vuitton Bag is made of original edition, with all correct markings in every details and 100% mirror image.AAA+ Quality. Made by 100% Sheepskin. Gold bronze hardware with right marks. Stamped serial number inside . 100% Silver I...

javascript

@LanceRoberts, too late :)

I hope it was deleted by spam flags, so that it's really deleted.

Greg Hewgill

I think it was deleted by account nuking

Q: how know what methods an oject has

8:58 AM

struggling: close or edit?

-1

how know what methods an oject has for exmp oXMLHttpRequest?

javascript

Edit

then maybe close.

I edited it.

Q: Default sort order for main page on SO is completely broken/wrong

Hehe... it only took so long

0

The times are all over the place. Moderation tools for django apps ? 4m ago Using fixed text together with <%# when databinding in Asp.NET doesn't work 2m ago Looking for alternative PHP fgetcsv() function to handlle textfiles 2m ago How do i process date and time on sql and php 1m ago To ...

bug

@radp, that's a joke right? why would you want to edit it before closing?

@radp Can't bother editing, especially for someone who can't even bother giving himself a proper display name (asdf, ha!)

9:07 AM

@Benjol Because you don't get to say what gets closed and what doesn't

but you get to say what gets edited and what doesn't!

@YiJiang Hey, he actually bothered changing his display name from user20931301284917

@radp As if the result of repeatedly banging on the first three letters of the keyboard is any better! :P

Why would you close a perfectly fine novice question like that?

@LanceRoberts, for not even bothering to type properly? :)

He could be foreign or he could be unlearned.

@LanceRoberts Admittedly, I've seen worse, but in its original form it's pretty bad

9:13 AM

Yeh, it was real bad.

And even if the question is asked in its current state, I'm 99% sure it's a dupe

You're probably right about that.

If there's something I don't like about the new interesting tab, its that the same question keeps popping up at the top

But all the closers chose 'Not a Real Question'.

The good thing about the old view is that new question will constantly be moving down

@LanceRoberts First person chose that, everybody else does too

I'll see if I can find the dupe

9:14 AM

My questions are moving, just slowly, which is good I think

@LanceRoberts But there's one question that has occupied my second place for nearly 45 mins now

@YiJiang Wow, that's pretty bad.

BREAKING NEWS: A poorly phrased question is a question nonetheless

@radp I've just found a bunch of similar questions, at least some of which can be dupes

Dupes are a completely different topic.

> Your search query dir contains characters which need to be escaped. See this FAQ for more information.

WTF, Mozilla?

9:22 AM

@LanceRoberts Now that question, after getting another upvote, just climbed to the top again

@radp Where did that come from? Bugzilla?

@YiJiang developer.mozilla.org/…

It doesn't help Google sucks when looking for JS doc.

Q: jQuery - select invisible text overlaid on image, ala GMail PDF viewer

@radp No, not the method in object one, the one I was talking to @LanceRoberts about

This question, strangely enough

5

I'm overlaying invisible text on top of an image. Is there a jQuery plugin (or similar) that will allow users to select an area on the image (which also selects the overlaid text) and be able to copy the content. Right now, I have placed each character in its own <span /> tag. Problem is w...

javascript jquery jquery-ui jquery-plugins jquery-selectors

You're a jQuery magnet.